From a drag race to the runway

It was business as usual thoughout New York Fashion Week. With cameras everywhere, models gracefully walked the runway and showed off collections that designers worked months on. NYFW newcomer Marco Marco presented his collection but with a twist. Many of his models were drag queens and transgender women, which is a huge step for the LGBT community. Marco has many celebrity clients ranging from Shakira to Nicki Minaj and originally only did shows in Los Angeles. This is his first time presenting a collection in New York. NYFW is a huge platform for designers to show the world what they’re made of, and Marco’s choice to include many trans women and drag queens is a step in the right direction.

Some of the models walking in the show are no strangers to high fashion. MILK a.k.a Daniel Donigan (pictured below) is close friends and has worked with Marc Jacobs. He has also walked in one of Marco’s previous shows.

Another queen that appeared in the show was Miss Fame (pictured below). A recent contestant on Rupaul’s Drag Race, she’s a fan favorite for her fashion sense and sophistication. She was absolutely one of the highlights of the show with her beautiful gown. Interestingly, the man holding her hand was not part of the show. According to Courtney Act, another model in the show who was also on Drag Race said the man wasn’t even supposed to be on stage. “He’s a makeup artist from Style Fashion Week who thought it would be fun to totally ruin the show by walking on stage with Fame (and Fame was too polite to push him off)” she said in a Reddit comment. Talk about unprofessional, but of course Miss Fame handled it with class.

Marco Marco wasn’t the first to embrace drag and trans culture into his show. In 2014 Jean Paul Gaultier closed his fall show with Conchita Wurst. If you live under a rock, Conchita is an Austrian drag queen who won last year’s Eurovision.

Gaultier and Marco are just two of the designers that are making the fashion industry more inclusive to everyone. While creativity and expression is highly valued in the industry, diversity is one thing it’s very short on. But in the past few years, we’ve seen immense improvement on that front as the models coming from every walk of life. This will only improve in the years to come as more and more designers open up to including all types of people to model their work.